Excerpt from Landmarks Preservation Commission designation report:

“The Commission further finds that, among its important qualities, the ground floor interior of the Empire State Building provides an overwhelming grand entrance to the building which today is New York City’s best-known symbol; that it is one of a series of modernistic interiors created for the midtown skyscrapers of the 1920s; that it is largely intact; that it was designed in the same spirit as the building’s exterior; simplicity of detail, long unbroken lines, and beautiful materials; that this design, like that of the exterior, was a product of the extraordinary practical requirements of the size and scope of the building, and of architect William Lamb’s stylistic preferences; that because of its size the interior was divided into two portions: an entrance lobby at Fifth Avenue, and long corridor lobbies encompassing the elevator banks; that the Fifth Avenue Lobby, arranged as a long hall focusing on a modernistic aluminum silhouette of the Empire State Building on the far wall, symbolically welcomes visitors, while the corridors, elevator banks, and inner store entrances and windows create a sense of a grand concourse, suggestive of the enormous office building housing a working population of many thousands; that its striking modernistic details – especially the aluminum silhouettes in the Fifth Avenue entrance lobby, the aluminum mezzanine bridges in the corridors, the silhouetted elevator doors, the ribbed marble walls, and the zig-zag ribbed ceilings in the elevator banks and West 33rd and 34th Street entrances – are suggestive of the technological possibilities for the future promised by the World’s tallest building; and that the interior continues to function as an outstanding space and provide a splendid introduction for the millions of visitors drawn annually to the Empire State Building.”